Kamaru UsmanThis past weekend the UFC fired up its much-anticipated Fight Island project. An ambitious, unique plan for holding MMA fights during a pandemic, I have to say, it is a pretty cool idea.
The card was a bit light on accomplished wrestlers, but of the two high-level wrestlers featured, one was the reigning champion and main event of the evening, the other impressed greatly in his preliminary bout victory. I should also point out that while co-main event winner and UFC featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski can wrestle his rear end off and actually won a national title in Australia, he did so at age 12 and left the sport for rugby shortly thereafter. As for the two aforementioned high-level wrestlers, here is what we learned about them.
Kamaru Usman
What we learned: The UFC's 170-pound champion earned a unanimous decision over Jorge Masvidal, but still has room for improvement in his overall mixed martial arts game. Now let me be clear, this is not a knock on Usman, but rather a reflection of the colossal athletic and combative ability that he possesses.
Usman came into the sport of MMA with very high expectations. On the strength of his fantastic wrestling resume, anchored primarily by his NCAA Division II national title and his time spent as a resident athlete at the U.S. Olympic Training Center, many had him pegged as a potential future champ right from the start. Considering his wrestling skill, incredibly strength, great size (he competed successfully in freestyle as high as 96 kilograms), explosiveness, and relative youth, one would have to think that Usman's ceiling is indeed very high.
As he has in all 12 of his UFC fights, Usman got the job done. He won convincingly on all three judges' scorecards and he's going home with the belt, but Usman still needs his signature win. He still needs one of those flawless victory-type performances to serve as his masterpiece and to cement his status as one of the best fighters in history, which is his stated goal. This was not it.
Given what we have seen thus far from Usman, we know he has considerable power in his fists, a ruthless clinch game in terms of his upper body takedowns, miserable pressure, and the nasty right hands that he digs to the body when in close. He has an unshakeable resolve, fantastic cardio, and ground-and-pound that is good enough to do damage while maintaining positional advantages.
With this in mind, the type of signature win we want to see from Usman could feature an advancing, stalking, aggressor pushing his foe to the fence before hurting him with a big right hand, tossing him to the mat, and finishing him off with punches and hammer-fists from on top. In other words, we want to see him fight with airtight execution and a sense of urgency that sees him aggressively playing to his strengths while deliberately shifting between the dimensions of an MMA contest. We have seen Usman knock out an overmatched opponent, we've seen him grind out fighters over the course of a full fight, and we've seen him win a war of attrition title fight against a deserving challenger, but we have not seen him execute in the manner outlined above.
Despite the fact that Usman's dance partner on Saturday night was an incredibly seasoned, wily veteran, he is a pumped up 155-pounder who took the fight on a week's notice and still managed to make Kamaru look a bit stiff and a bit green. All of MMA's greats had wins that left no doubt as to who the best in the world was. Fights that show the clear gap between the champ and everyone else. Kamaru Usman can still achieve this himself, but until he does, he will be known as a champ but not an all-time great.
Makwan Amirkhani
What we learned: The Iranian/Kurdish fighter from Finland is one of the smoothest, slickest fighters on the UFC roster. His style is a study in efficiency and kinesiology.
Amirkhani, a Finnish national champion in both freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling, with a good degree of success competing in senior-level Greco-Roman tournaments at the higher levels, is quite unique in his style. Not just in the way that he seamlessly flows with the natural energy of a fight from one position to the next, but also in the way that he incorporates each of MMA's three primary facets (striking, wrestling, submission grappling). You don't see too many fighters moving like Amirkhani.
Most fighters who come from a significant wrestling background can't help but use the typical hardnosed, rugged style of a wrestler as the backbone of their fighting style. Lots of shooting and clinching, intense, sustained pressure, effective and considerable weight cutting, and a whole lot of grit are usually the main pillars of a wrestler's fighting style. Not Amirkhani.
Can he change levels and get in deep on opponent's hips? Sure he can. Can he apply intense pressure up against the cage? You bet. Able to go upper body and hit big slams from the clinch? All day. Amirkhani differs from most other converted wrestlers in several ways. For one, he doesn't rely much on cutting weight. He may even be a tad undersized for the UFC's 145-pound class. Also, he has no qualms about losing position because he knows how to either get it right back, or, finish the fight from where he winds up. In fact, Amirkhani is just as comfortable attacking with submissions from his back and rolling for heel hooks as his is in the body lock or inside the guard. So often, even in 2020, you don't see many wrestlers fully take to the more nuanced aspects of submission grappling, but Amirkhani blends the best of both worlds and is racking up UFC wins because of it.
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